Music as Sculpture/Dream into Reality

I recently visited a sculptural installation in downtown Chicago known as Cloud Gate. From this location, I telephoned a friend in Toronto and, accompanied by ambient and reflected sounds, reported to him what I was experiencing there. I also made digital photographs that he was quickly able to view. By means of this transmitted information and all apposite aspects of our particular rapport, my friend was able to experience for himself the physical presence of Cloud Gate in such a way as to remedy what could otherwise have been described as a gap in his experience of reality. My friend was of course ‘awake’ when he received this information, but he was obviously not in direct physical contact with the content of my communciation.

While the facility of dream images and dream-generated ideas to nourish and complete our perception of reality is well-known to many of us, we tend (understandably) to distinguish between images experienced in deep sleep and technologically mediated waking realizations of unfamiliar but substantial locations. Understood as media, however, dreams can be seen as analogous to the capacity for revelation facilitated by the technological exteriorization of the collective human nervous system.

It was of some significance that the experience I was transmitting to my friend was itself facilitated by an artwork, the Cloud Gate installation; my own waking experience, in other words, was also a mediated dream/realization manifesting the intention of a ‘non-present’ artist, Anish Kapoor. A question arises as to how a stationary sculpture like Cloud Gate performs such an operation—how in this case it truly does function as the ‘gate’ indicated by its name. Kapoor’s sculpture does this by presenting the visitor with an optimally reflective and inclusive convex surface, effectively enveloping him or her in the overwhelming sum total of ambient and reflected illumination, which is to say that it creates a comprehensive environment of light.

An environment of light is of course a predominantly visual environment, and as such includes images cognizable by a human sensibility as meaningful and important. This is the reason why people without exception (even the blind) are attracted to Cloud Gate and its attendant perceptual revelations. One of the most crucial purposes of Cloud Gate is simply to attract, attraction being an indispensable element of any visual or alternative sensory phenomenon. It is after all a reality of human sensory life, of which Cloud Gate is one of innumerable possible examples, that no ultimate illumination of whatever variety can occur without a prior attraction to that which illuminates; and it is by virtue of Cloud Gate’s universal attractiveness that the content of its luminous ‘message’ is precisely the universality of its own appeal. Cloud Gate’s function, in other words, is to focus collective human awareness and to unify it around a single point; this, in essence, is what Cloud Gate does. My friend’s experience was thus simply a mediated extension of my own, itself mediated by the gateway or window that Cloud Gate was designed to be.

However flagrantly the social effects of a monument like Cloud Gate might contradict such a notion, there nevertheless lingers in the collective consciousness of our culture the idea that the realm of function does not extend to encompass works of art. Being the manifestation of an artist’s isolated and idiosyncratic sensibility (this way of thinking goes), it is no more than a fortunate (if socially useful) coincidence that an appropriately conceived artwork becomes a vortex of civic interest, inadvertently unifying a large and otherwise polarized metropolis and transforming its relationship to the global environment that in turn surrounds it. Using the case of Cloud Gate as an example, we asked ourselves what would be required to render its function as fully manifest—as illuminated—as its effects. By working backward from the intention of accomplishing this revelation, CWvortex has conceived a project that extends into the acoustic dimension the window or gateway function of Cloud Gate for the purpose of facilitating a sensorially unified experience of unity.

It is a fact that Cloud Gate reflects not only light but sound, and that it inhabits a unique and ever-changing acoustic environment as fluid as the ambient light and imagery it so powerfully reflects and recontextualizes. What would it mean for the people of Chicago to have a radiant acoustic experience as dramatically transformative as the visual experience that Cloud Gate already provides? What would it mean for this typically diverse human collective to experience a harmonious merging, across the sensory divide between eye and ear, of two distinct but perfectly allied strands of functional creative intent?

Of course the answers to these questions cannot be known until the project is realized; however, it is in the very act of asking them that the impetus to realize arises. We see in this instance how it is precisely through the asking of questions that the dream seeks out its integration in reality, and we begin to understand that humanity’s control of its destiny lies in its power to ask universally fruitful questions. By creating a sonic environment contemporaneous with Cloud Gate’s visual aura, CWvortex proposes to physically manifest, in the service of global harmony, the human organism’s sculptural capacity for purposeful collective sensory integration.